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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Let us talk for a second about food porn. Ah yes, food porn, the delicious, and often gratuitous, images that inspire us to cook, bake, eat, and all the while keep looking. Some food porn is better than other food porn, and yet, we are shamelessly drawn to it, tickled by it's temptation.

We are obsessed with the photographs of our friend Susan Surface - she's got a keen eye and a divine sense of the uncanny.

One of her latest projects (of many, we must ad) is for Victor Agran's course, Drawing and Architectural Form, at the Yale School of Architecture is making us drool. Drawing inspiration from Gordon Matta-Clark's communal gastronomy projects as well as his deconstructive architecture; she made 20 pounds of cake to photograph and then share with her fellow classmates.

The images are beautiful - she capitalizes on the strangely intimate moment of cutting into a fresh cake and revealing its many colors, layers, and secret flavors. In the artist's own words: "I was inspired by the pornographic gaze evident in the video recordings of site-specific works such as "Splitting." I am also engaged with historical uses of food in art and architecture, such as in the traditional vanitas, still-life, and memento mori - how depictions of food force us to consider our own materiality and mortality. I combined this with some thoughts about artificiality and preservation in the use of something so inorganic and nontraditional as inkjet print and edible spraypaint on frosting."